Hartford's Halcyon Days

`Far From Heaven' Captures Some Of The '50s Naivete, Insularity Of A City That On The Surface Seemed Idyllic

November 21, 2002|By MALCOLM JOHNSON; Courant Film Critic

Hartford in the '50s was another country, nothing like the struggling ``Rising Star'' of today. The proud, insular capital city was also very different -- certainly physically and perhaps spiritually -- from the bigoted, backbiting, divided backwater called Hartford in Todd Haynes' ``Far From Heaven.''

Haynes' film is set in Hartford in 1957 and presents what at first glance is an ideal suburban family absorbed in corporate culture. But a closer look reveals the husband has a secret gay life, and the wife is enamored with her black gardener.

FOR THE RECORD - Correction published November 22, 2002.The Town and County Club was incorrectly called the Town and Country Club in a story about 1950s Hartford on Page D1 Thursday.

Nearly half a century ago, Hartford's ``downtown'' had everything: Main Street department stores crowned by the great G.Fox & Co.; picture palaces whose jewel was the Loew's Poli; the State Theater on Windsor Street, where the big names in popular music played; jazz spots; and, for a time, a pre-Broadway tryout house.

Locally owned banks, those august shrines to old money, and all those rich insurance companies made the city a Yankee financial center. Many city neighborhoods were home to middle-class owners and renters. But, of course, Hartford was a segregated city. The black population lived mostly in the North End, already, even then, home to three major housing projects: Bellevue Square, Stowe Village and Nelton Court.

Before I-84 sliced through downtown, it was not so easy to draw a boundary line between the North End and the rest of the city, with its Italian, Polish, FrenchCanadian and Irish enclaves. Windsor Street, anchored by the State, ran from the edge of downtown into an edge of the North End. A few doors from the State was the legendary Club Sundown, regarded as the prime black jazz spot, a venue with a rainbow front where Horace Silver had famously played on his way up in 1950.

The upper end of Main Street, before it curved at ``the Tunnel,'' melded with Clay Hill, and a mix of businesses selling hardware, glass and lumber served contractors. It was also the place to buy fresh fish. Beyond, the ``ghetto'' solidified between Albany and Tower avenues, whose western ends were Jewish neighborhoods. Major landmarks of the North End were the sprawling brownstone Arsenal School and the once grand Kimberly hotel, both fronting Main Street.

The majority of white people knew only of these drab, poor reaches of a prosperous city if they drove, or rode by bus, between Windsor and the downtown. There was little contact between the races, except for those with servants -- like Julianne Moore's upper-middle-class wife Cathy Whitaker in ``Far From Heaven.'' Even in the construction business, whites, many of them immigrants, outnumbered native-born African Americans. The building trade unions took care of their own, and a carpenter was likely to be of Scandinavian extraction, while bricklayers and plasterers were often Italian-born.

For many white residents, whether blue-collar or white-collar, Hartford in those naive halcyon days was not far from heaven. It was, it seemed, an ideal place to live, not too big, not too small, with comfortable, affordable suburbs minutes away on all sides.

But in many cases, the spoiled children of, say, West Hartford -- indisputably then the leading 'burb and most likely the site of the Whitaker residence -- regarded Hartford as stodgy, boring, even stifling. Yet the Heublein Hotel, the faded gray chateau overlooking Bushnell Park at Gold Street, played host to such jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie and Teddy Wilson. And seeing Fred Astaire dance across the huge screen of the Metro showcase, the Loew's Poli across from City Hall, could be a transporting pleasure. (Ah, that ``Bandwagon'' experience.) There were good bookstores, most notably the ancient, oil-smelling Witkower's on Asylum Street. Farther down the block was the wonderfully funky and old-fashioned complete music store, Gallup & Alfred.

For a night out, Front Street, still crammed with tenements housing Italian families, offered a string of restaurants, from DePasquale's to Pippie's. And there was dancing to Paul Landerman's band at the new Statler Hilton.

All are gone now. As that adolescent's favorite, Thomas Wolfe, would keen: ``O, Lost.''

So many of the buildings of fragmented memory have vanished, one by one. Front Street was cleared for Constitution Plaza, which was to have been the cornerstone of the future. The Loew's Poli and the Loew's Poli Palace and the Heublein gave way to Bushnell Plaza. The Garde Hotel on Asylum and High streets, with its ornate brickwork, and the old YMCA, with turrets to match the Memorial Arch, inspired the creation of the Hartford Architecture Conservancy, but nothing could save them, and architecturally inferior structures replaced them.